The GQ Cover Story: Channing Tatum

Let’s consider the improbable premise that the most revelatory performance of Channing Tatum’s ever escalating movie career is one that he filmed over two drunken nights in New Orleans in 2012. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were already deep into shooting their grotesque apocalyptic comedy, This Is the End, when Rogen contacted Tatum and asked whether he would consider a cameo appearance.

"All he had to say was ’Danny McBride,’ ’leash,’ and ’a Mexican wrestling mask,’ " says Tatum. "It was just the most wrong idea I’d ever heard. ’You’re Danny McBride’s sex slave, you’re like his gimp.’ And I was like, ’All right, I’m in.’ "

If there was a way to carry off this role with a certain self-protective poise, Tatum magnificently failed to find it. "Only a true insane person would try and play a gimp that’s on a leash with reserve and dignity, in my opinion," he reasons. "If you put on a jockstrap and a Mexican wrestling mask and you think reserve and dignity is anything in your near future…" Tatum shakes his head and explains the mind-set he applied to the role: "Be as crazy as I could possibly be, and have fun. If it felt weird, I would have stopped. It felt weird in a good way." He sees this as an example of a more general principle: "I get one shot at life, and I can say that I’ve lived a crazy one, and I’ve pushed the limit almost at every turn, and I’m super proud of that."

This Is the End’s Jonah Hill—also Tatum’s co-star in 21 Jump Street and its imminent sequel—doesn’t appear in the gimp scene, but he was there on set overnight, drinking with Tatum between takes, getting trashed. "You have someone that is beloved by mainstream America playing the most degrading, insane part in an insane film," Hill observes. "When you have a major movie star who really doesn’t give a shit about their image and is willing to just do ballsy, creative things, I think people eat it up."

So that is one lesson to be taken here—about a kind of immensely likable devil-may-care fearlessness.

But it is not the only one. In the scenes that appear in the finished movie, Tatum is shown being tugged in the dirt by McBride on a leash, cowering while McBride boasts about butt-fucking him, then pawing at McBride’s genitalia before McBride makes him do tricks like a dog. But these were not the only scenes filmed. There was a further sequence, in which Tatum hacks off James Franco’s left foot with some kind of ax and then laps eagerly at the blood spurting from Franco’s severed stump, catching as much in his mouth as possible as it sprays over his face. For Tatum, fond memories: "I mean, when can I say I’ve drank the blood of James Franco? Why wouldn’t I go and do that?"

But Tatum has no idea, until I tell him so, that this part of his night’s work ended up on the cutting-room floor. And the precise reason why it was cut is explained by Seth Rogen on the DVD commentary track. It turned out that audiences, who had withstood so much depravity in the previous ninety-two minutes, simply couldn’t take it, and the reason seemed to relate less to the act itself than to the man who was doing it. As Rogen explains, unveiling a little-known rule of modern Hollywood, and the weird but beloved place that Tatum has established for himself within it:

"Audiences just don’t want to see Channing Tatum do that.… They want to see him do almost everything except eat James Franco’s foot."

I put it to Tatum that this, apparently, is the line: The public is happy to accept him being butt-fucked as a gimp, but not cutting off James Franco’s leg and drinking his blood.

"Yeah," Tatum says, beaming, as though each separate part of this is its own good news. "Society’s amazing."

"This," Tatum tells me, "was supposed to be my year off."

We are sitting in the back room of an English-themed bar and restaurant called The Pikey, down the hill from the Hollywood home he shares with his wife, Jenna, and 9-month-old daughter, Everly. In the previous eighteen months, he shot four movies in a row: White House Down, Foxcatcher (a wrestling drama from the director of Moneyball, now delayed until later this year), Jupiter Ascending (the Wachowski siblings’ return to heroic science fiction, out next month), and 22 Jump Street."I feel like I was definitely the fat kid at the buffet. There were four really great projects, and I was ’I wanna do them all.’ They’re like, ’You know doing four movies back-to-back is going to kill you?’ and I’m, ’Yeah, but that’s something I can take. That’s just going to be tiring, and tired doesn’t kill you.’ " So he committed. "Zero breaks," he emphasizes. "Then we had sort of a crazy, harebrained idea to try to have a kid, and it happened the first time, basically. And I don’t think we thought it all the way through." His wife gave birth in England while he was shooting Jupiter Ascending."We were happy as hell about it," he says. But clearly it all took something out of him—hence the year off.

Though, predictably, that doesn’t seem to be going too well. A familiar conundrum that comes with great success: In its wake, you get presented with so many more of the opportunities for which you fought so hard that it’s difficult to find time to enjoy it. This has clearly just hit home: "I love our job, what we get to do, creating, hustling, doing all the things, but man, I don’t feel like I’m getting to enjoy any of the spoils, because it’s a treadmill. It’s a fun treadmill, but it’s definitely a treadmill." Bear in mind that the rise that Tatum has recently enjoyed is, in some ways, unprecedented. "You know, the guy had three movies do a hundred million dollars in six months—nobody’s ever done that," points out Steven Soderbergh, director of the third of these, Magic Mike. (The other two were the romantic weepie The Vow and 21 Jump Street.)

"What I actually respect about this entire business," Tatum will tell me, "is the hustle of it all and how many people have carved out their purposes in it. Somehow I carved out a place for myself in it."

This reminds me of the wonderful way that Matthew McConaughey liked to describe Tatum when they were promoting Magic Mike together, as a man who is always "looking to the next gap, the next angle. He’s a hustler. He won’t pick your pocket, but he knows where your wallet is."

Tatum nods when I mention this. "It’s probably one of the cooler, cooler things that anyone’s ever said about anyone. But I’m sure he’s heard that more than likely about himself from someone else."

You don’t think he means it?

"I think we have a common trait, I would say. I mean, the movie we made—we made it in a way that was very hustle-ish, Soderbergh and I. It was really his idea, and I was just like a punk-ass kid that was, ’All right, great! Fuck it! Let’s do it! I don’t even know, really, what it all means, but I can feel this is in the spirit of how and why I want to be in this business. And if all the dominoes line up, we’re going to be okay. And if the stars align—not just the dominoes—then we’re going to be really good.’ That’s what a hustler’s like: If I can connect these dominoes, then I’m going to be able to eat tonight, but if I pull off the big one, then I’m going to be really set."

It was with Magic Mike that Tatum really pulled off the big one. This wasn’t just a hugely successful film—over $167 million in box office worldwide—but a film that he put together, based on his own life, and it was also a film that he and Soderbergh owned, putting up the movie’s budget—said to be $7 million—between them. Word is that for his investment, Tatum got at least $40 million back.

Tatum disputes this. "That is not true at all. That goes to show you that people on the Internet have truly no idea how the film industry—"

I interrupt to point out that this isn’t just "people on the Internet." Forbes magazine estimated that he made $60 million between June 2012 and June 2013, "the vast majority" from Magic Mike.

But he doesn’t bend. "That’s how sad it is, that movie people don’t even know how the actual film industry makes money. That’s how crazy it is right now. It’s the Wild, Wild West right now. For movie people to think that anyone made $40 million by themselves on a movie is absolutely insane. We knew with the equation that essentially Steven and Greg [Jacobs, Soderbergh’s producing partner] thought up, we were going to make this movie for absolutely nothing and we were going to make money, because we made it with a structure that pretty much you couldn’t lose money."

But you made a lot of money?

"I wouldn’t say a lot. That’s why we’re making another one. If I had $40 million, I don’t know if I’d be making another one. I don’t know if I’d be working as hard as I am. And that’s the God’s honest truth. I don’t like to be away from my friends and family that much."

As we sit drinking, the woman at the next table leans over toward Tatum. She says that she has to say hello because they share the same unusual first name. (She pulls out a card to prove it.) He tells her she may be the only other person he has met with this name.

She nods. "I always say, ’Yes, like Channing Tatum.…’ "

"No way," he says, and explains that he always used to say "like Carol Channing."

"I used to say that," she tells him, "but now I say you."

Tatum has never been given a clear reason why his parents chose such an unusual name, though for years he didn’t even realize it was his name—he went by Chan, which is what everyone close to him still calls him. His mother also used to call him Chanimal.

"I would make a mess out of anything," he explains, "and climb anything. I feel really bad, now that I have a child and I know how hard it is. I’ve asked her since then, ’Was I a bad kid?’ and she just gets this look on her face. ’You weren’t bad, you were just really…busy.’ If there was ever a biography of my mom, it would probably be Worried: The Life of Kay Tatum."

Were you aware you might have been slightly out of the norm?

"I think I knew I was wild. I think I definitely knew that. Soccer was the first sport that my parents put me in, and ultimately all the parents kind of came over to my mom and were, ’We think Channing would be better at football.… We love him, he’s really great, but he’s kind of hurting our children.’ I was just a little wild."

The young Tatum was distinctive in other ways. For one thing, he had an invisible friend until around third grade, a friend who even made the move to Mississippi with the family. "His name was Boy," says Tatum, explaining how he would save an extra place at the table: " ’Don’t sit here—Boy’s sitting here!’ I would make a plate for him and all that. Crazy behavior. I think I just lived in an imaginary world. I was always playing war in the woods, people are chasing me… I wasn’t doing it because I was desperate for friends. I had friends."

Did you know what he looked like?

"Um, not really. I think I always saw him as invisible. I couldn’t see features, in a way, but I knew he was there."

And you talked out loud to him?

"Yeah. Uh-huh. I haven’t really thought about him in so long."

One of Tatum’s favorite TV shows is The Biggest Loser. "I really do love it," he says. "It’s terrible and it’s bad, but I really do think it’s because I have an inner fat kid in me. If I didn’t enjoy sports so much.… My dad was 370 pounds at one point. I definitely have that. I can completely lose myself into just absolutely satisfying things—a really amazing cheeseburger, a pizza, good fries, a beer. I enjoy being comfortable and eating whatever the hell I like. It’s a big thing for me, just having the freedom to be able to do that." It might be relevant here to point out that his reservation for our table was under the name of Johnny Cakes, and that part of the reason why is the simplest one of all. "I just love cake," he explains. "Confetti cake, to be specific. It has little colored candies inside the cake, and then you get the confetti icing, which is really hard to find sometimes." Here is a subject that he speaks of with passion. "It’s really hard to explain to people, because it’s not icing with sprinkles on top. It’s icing that actually has candies inside of it. It’s Funfetti icing."

What makes it great?

"The icing, coupled with the actual confetti cake. It’s a beautiful mix. It is an angel sent from heaven."

Tatum tells me that he likes to be at 180 pounds, but right now, he says, "I’m still anywhere from twenty-five to thirty pounds over." A few weeks before we meet, he appeared on Ellen, and in reply to the light ribbing of Ellen’s opening comment—that post-Magic Mike everyone expects him to take his clothes off—he said:

"No, no, you definitely don’t want that right now. Right now, what me and my wife like to call it, I am very fappy. I am very—"

"You’re…fappy?" she queried.

"Fat and happy," he clarified.

As we enjoy another beer, I bring up the word fappy, and Tatum explains that it came from a week where he and Jenna were having fun "melding words." That’s when I tell him that, unfortunately, fappy seems to mean something else.

"Oh, does it?" he says. "What does fappy mean?"

Um…prone to masturbation.

"No! No! Amazing!"

I explain that the word is not actually in Webster’s because it is fairly recent slang, though it is listed in the Urban Dictionary, and there is a trail of its use going back many years. (Some ugly lexicography: Fappy, the adjective, is derived from the verb "to fap," a word that appears to have come into use as an onomatopoeic representation of the onanistic act it denotes: fap-fap-fap-fap…) Surreally, I tell him, the word fappy was also at the center of an Internet hoax last year that Michael Moore’s next movie would be about anti-masturbation campaigners and be called Fappy: The Documentary.

So that’s what you told Ellen you were.

"Amazing! That is the best thing I’ve ever heard. I’m that as well. If I didn’t have such a beautiful wife, that would have been doubly right."

When Tatum first started sharing his idea for a movie about his stripping past, there was one story he focused on. It was about going to a strippers’ convention—thousands of women in a convention hall with one big stage on which maybe a hundred strippers appear. In fact, says Reid Carolin, Tatum’s friend and producing partner who wrote the actual script, that was the first thing Tatum told him about those days: "I want to do the story of when I’m in a dark U-Haul with a bunch of these guys and we’re doing drugs driving up to the stripper convention." Soderbergh says he steered them away from it, telling them, "You know what? It’s too big—that idea alone is a movie."

Now it is a movie that they are going to make, as a sequel to the first. Rumored to be called Magic Mike XXL, it’ll be an on-the-road adventure, inspired by the two strippers’ conventions Tatum attended. "We cut out so much stuff that was just really juicy fun things to happen in a movie that you haven’t seen before," he says. One of the conventions he attended was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They went en masse in his buddy’s van and danced for 3,000 women. "The women would come from miles and miles around," he recalls. "Then you lock the doors and you say all bets are off. It gets zany and crazy, and it’s a wild ride. It’s an incubator for insanity. It doesn’t matter almost what you do onstage. I don’t want to put anything in black and white on a page, but if you’ve been to one, you know how crazy it gets, and now pour kerosene on that. You’ve seen Magic Mike—now multiply that. Mob mentality. It’s just exponentially crazier. I thought it was absolutely insane."

Not just the women, but the other strippers, too. "They’re just so out there you’re in an alternate reality. Even as a 19-year-old kid, I just couldn’t believe this world I was in. These guys, some of them are really cool, some of them are completely, like, hippies, some are completely meatheads and steroid-crazy freakazoids, other ones are stuck in the ’80s, and some of them are an everyday Joe that has a construction job, and some of them are businessmen. One guy was an attorney during the day. There’s so much salacious and dangerous stuff going on around you, but it’s fun at the same time, as a 19-year-old kid—money, women, a good time. I’m lucky—I don’t have a drug addiction, I didn’t get anyone pregnant. I probably got really lucky."

But you weren’t a choirboy?

"No. Not at all. When you’re in the world, you don’t want to be that guy. And it was part of the allure—I wanted to walk on the wild side for a second."

Over these past few years, Soderbergh and Tatum seem to have formed quite a bond; Tatum appeared in Soderbergh’s final three films (the others were Haywire and Side Effects) before Soderbergh’s recent retirement from movie directing. This is Tatum’s self-deprecating and playful account of their relationship: "I’m probably like the annoying little brother that he hates but yet has some sort of ’All right, fuck it, I’ll put Channing in my fucking movie.’ " Naturally, Soderbergh dismisses this. "No, of course not," he says. "I took him seriously from the get-go, and doing so has been great for my career and great for my life. You know, Channing’s viewed differently today than he was five years ago, and the way people think of him now, I thought of him the minute he was in the room working with me. I went, Okay, this guy’s on the list now."

But however deep their mutual respect, this Magic Mike sequel won’t be tempting Steven Soderbergh out of retirement. Not that Tatum hasn’t tried: "It’s super complicated, in my opinion, why he wanted to stop doing film. I lobbied probably harder than anybody else—we had many, many nights of heated debate. I was, ’I don’t fucking get it! Why?’ And he’s like, ’I don’t need it.’ " Instead, the movie will be directed by Soderbergh’s longtime producing partner, Greg Jacobs. But—in a way that illustrates how Soderbergh’s retirement seems as if it will be one of the strangest in history—that does not mean he will not be involved. He will still be the camera operator. He will also still be the director of photography. And he will also still be the film editor.

"I want to be there, but I don’t want to be the director," Soderbergh explains. "I want to be a part of it. I want to be in the band, but I just don’t want to be the frontman this time."

Not long before 21 Jump Street’s release, there was a conversation between its leading actors and its directors about how much money it might make on its opening weekend. By this time they knew they had made a good movie, and their confidence was growing. Also, they had been drinking.

That is how Tatum came to voice a fanciful prediction: $35 million. This was ridiculous, oiled-up, magical over-optimism. "I just knew," Hill explains to me, "for what we cost, if our opening weekend was above $30 million, we were a massive success." Anything higher than that was unimaginable. And that is why Hill highlighted the absurdity of Tatum’s prediction by stating exactly what he would do if Tatum turned out to be right.

"I will confirm," says co-director Phil Lord, "that there were many witnesses to this conversation. And my understanding from my lawyers is that verbal contracts are binding in a court of law."

On the morning of Monday, March 19, 2012, America—and Jonah Hill—awoke to the news that over the previous weekend the movie version of 21 Jump Street had topped the box office. And it had done so by taking in $36 million. A moment of great happiness for all concerned, though maybe also a little awkwardness for Hill, given what he had said to Tatum a few nights earlier—a promise of unfortunate specificity that went like this:

"I will kiss your tip! I will kiss the tip of your dick through your underwear if we make $35 million."

"I will only say," Hill tells me now, "that Channing and I say a lot of stupid stuff when we drink together."

"I haven’t made him do it yet," Tatum tells me. "For obvious reasons. That’s a bad bet to lose—it’s not too good to win, either. But definitely the shame of it would be enjoyable. It’s my trump card, for sure. He tries not to bring it up at all costs. Unless he did something horrible to me, I don’t know if I could ever cash it in. It would change our relationship forever."

"It’s a lose-lose for both parties, I feel," echoes Hill. "I’d have to clear it with Jenna.… There’s all sorts of loopholes that have to be taken into consideration."

But then again…

"Maybe," Tatum reflects, "on a drunk night when we’re all being crazy and hopefully, knock on wood, Jump Street 2 works out and people love it, maybe out of the elation of that event in our lives I might call in the bet." He considers this. "Or I might make him double or nothing."

Told of this final comment, Hill embraces it, and the way out it offers.

"I might have to double down," he agrees, "because there’s no way I’m doing what I said I was going to do."

Tatum’s first idea for how we might spend some of our time together was to head out of town for some go-karting in the desert. Then he heard that I was on crutches. His second idea, which he broaches rather tentatively over our last drink at The Pikey, is very different.

"What about going to Color Me Mine?" he suggests. "It’s like a pottery place that you get to paint your own pottery."

Why? I ask.

"It just popped into my mind. I’ve never actually been there—I want to go. I’ve always wanted to paint my own bowls and dishes and shit."

It seems far too surreal an idea not to agree to, so we meet there the following afternoon. It’s just off Ventura Boulevard in the Valley—he says he has often driven by the storefront and thought of visiting—and is near empty. Tatum lays down the ground rules. "All right, so this is the deal—I’m going to make you something, you’re going to make me something. All right? And I will keep it forever." This fits in with his plan for future such visits: "I want to eventually be able to make my own plates and stuff, so I can stop having to worry about what to buy people as gifts. I can just make them something, and it will be unbelievably annoying that they have to keep it forever. ’You’re not using my plates?’ "

Though this is new to him, Tatum has been sculpting in clay for a little while. That idea found him when he was walking home from a bar on a day off from filming Haywire in Santa Fe—"There is a ton of bad art in Santa Fe," he notes—and saw a guy sculpting in a Santa Fe storefront. Tatum watched him for about twenty minutes until the man invited Tatum in, gave him some clay, and told him to have a go. "I was, ’I don’t know why I feel like I can do this, but I feel like I can.’ " (Tatum says this as though he doesn’t notice that it equally applies to every stage—stripping, modeling, acting, movie producing—in the Rise of Channing Tatum.) Back in Los Angeles, he took one lesson his wife got for him, but the rest has been instinct. He likes to sculpt at night, with a bottle of wine or a glass of bourbon. "I probably drink too much, you know," he says. "My wife, that’s what she bought into.… I’m probably a pretty high-functioning, I guess, you know, I would say, alcoholic, I guess." He likes how it slows down his mind. "There’s probably a tendency to escape. I equate it to creativity, and I definitely equate it to having a good time." Still, he says, nothing makes you cut back like having a baby, and he’ll not drink for four months when they make the Magic Mike sequel. "Then, at the end of that movie," he says, "it’s go time."

This afternoon, with sobriety working against us, we each start with a blank coffee mug. (Tatum also takes an unpainted ceramic sock monkey, which he christens Boy in commemoration of his invisible friend, though he will run out of time to paint it.) As we paint, we talk. I learn that his wife likes fortune-tellers and tarot-card readers but he doesn’t, in a way that seems to encapsulate his driving philosophy: "I don’t want to know. I want to have a real clear intention of what I want and then go for that—and I don’t want to know if it’s going to happen. If I want it, I’m going to go and get it; that’s what I want to believe." I also learn that he wishes people had tails like dogs do, so that they couldn’t hide their emotions.

He also talks some more about his career. The trap of overwork is one subject he keeps coming back to. "In hindsight, what I’ve come out of the woods with is, yeah, you can do four movies back-to-back, but I don’t know if I gave everything to each one as much as I should have. It was a really, really beautiful experience all the way around, but if I had to do it over again, I would have done things different—I haven’t ever said that about my career. But I’m proud of every one of the movies."

It strikes me as significant that Channing Tatum is the rare successful actor who didn’t grow up dreaming of seeing his own face on a movie screen. It never crossed his mind. And once it started to happen anyway, that lack of expectation seems to have created an unusual lack of presumption that has served him well. As Reid Carolin tells me, "I think by nature he always saw himself as more like a blue-collar person who wasn’t training for years and years and years to become a famous actor. He was lucky enough to fall into it and always felt, ’I need to get better at this.’ And that energy has led others to let him into the process." At the very least, that’s the story Tatum is shrewd enough to tell himself and others—that he is the eternal student eager to learn from those who know more—and it is the one that has brought him great triumphs. And even if it hides the fact that he might also have lucked into a heap of talent somewhere along the way, it’s the approach most likely to drive his life and career upward and onward.

From now on, Tatum tells me, he hopes to make movies that he is involved in from the beginning, and he seems most excited about several projects he is developing to co-direct with Carolin. But he does talk about one other movie he is after—to play the Marvel mutant Gambit, "the only superhero I really followed.… He was the most real to me: smoking, drinking, women-loving, thief. He just looked cool to me. I’ve always loved him. And obviously he’s Cajun." Tatum was nearly cast in the role near the beginning of his career for X-Men: The Last Stand, but then Gambit was written out of that movie, and when the character was eventually used, in the first Wolverine film, Tatum wasn’t available to compete for the role because he was tied up with G.I. Joe. Taylor Kitsch got the part. But now Tatum would like to make a Gambit movie. As of yet, nothing is fid. "We’re talking about it. I’m proactively sort of going after it. And I feel bad, because I really love Taylor Kitsch as an actor and what he did with the part, but you know, you’ve got the things that you would really love to do and see." (A few weeks later, one of the producers of the X-men series confirms plans for Tatum to play Gambit in the future.)

The mug painting continues.

"I’m not as good as I want to be," he says as he works, "but this is fun. This is just being a kid again. Just kind of getting to do whatever, and it doesn’t matter."

The mug he paints for me has, on one side, a portrait of me that I find both charming and terrifying, and the words I AM DR. FAPPY. On the other side he has painted a heart.

Inside, along the bottom and up the side wall, he has written the words I MEANT EVERY STROKE.

[Chris Heath](http://www.gq.com/contributors/chris-heath) is a GQ correspondent.

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